Controversies and ongoing debates

Abstract

Evolutionary psychology has generated as much controversy as it has evidence, and this chapter examines the major criticisms the field faces and how its proponents respond to them. It addresses methodological disputes including the reliance on WEIRD populations, the use of non-human primate models, and the difficulty of linking modern behaviour to ancestral fitness, showing how researchers have attempted to address each without always resolving them. The chapter then turns to ethical and political criticisms, examining claims that evolutionary accounts of sex differences, gender roles, and social hierarchy risk naturalising inequality, and considers the field’s response that explaining a behaviour is not the same as endorsing it. It explores debates over genetic determinism, adaptationism, and modularity, and considers how gene-environment interactions, epigenetics, and cultural evolution have complicated simple selectionist accounts of human psychology. Finally, the chapter reflects on what it means for a discipline to be self-correcting, arguing that evolutionary psychology’s engagement with its critics is itself evidence of scientific maturity rather than weakness.